Baiga

Clans and Kinship

Elwin (1939) describes three levels. The tribe is endogamous, though a woman of another tribe who marries a Baiga can be admitted after rites. It is divided into jat, more or less endogamous divisions that live apart: Russell (1916) names Binjhwar, Bharotia, Narotia or Nahar, Raibhaina, Kathbhaina, Kondwan or Kundi and Gondwaina, and Elwin adds the Bhumia, the Muria, the Kurka, the Sawat and the Dudh-bhaina. Each jat is divided into exogamous garh and goti. The garh, the more important, is territorial and not totemic: the idea is that every Baiga originally belonged to a particular hill or forest and must marry his daughters to men of another. Tradition holds that the first twelve garh were the twelve sons of Nanga Baigin. The goti, Elwin found, were borrowed from the Gond clans, carry Gond names, and are lightly kept: marrying inside one's goti is a fault atoned for with liquor, while the garh rule is kept more strictly, though Elwin found that it too was loosening. Descent is patrilineal and residence after marriage patrilocal (Encyclopedia of World Cultures). Villages have a headman, the mukaddam, and a panch of five.

Garh and goti as Verrier Elwin gives them in The Baiga (1939), chapter on exogamous divisions (pp. 172-175): first the twelve garh said to descend from the sons of Nanga Baigin, then two more garh named in his life histories, then the goti he recorded in Baihar, Kawardha and Niwas. Elwin's book has an appendix listing many more garh, not reproduced here. Maravi is added from Russell and Hira Lal (1916). In parts of Mandla Elwin found no goti at all, only garh.

In the Official Lists

• Scheduled Tribe

  Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar, Odisha, Maharashtra

  Listed as: Baiga

  In Uttar Pradesh in Sonbhadra district only ('Baiga (in the district of Sonbhadra)' in the 2011 census table).

• Scheduled Caste

  Uttar Pradesh

  Listed as: Baiga

  In Uttar Pradesh outside Sonbhadra district ('Baiga (excluding Sonbhadra district)' in the 2011 census table of Scheduled Castes).

The Baiga are also a particularly vulnerable tribal group (PVTG), a group within the Scheduled Tribes given special attention, in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, in the government list reproduced on Wikipedia from a 2019 press release; the category has had that name since 2006. In Uttar Pradesh the Baiga are a Scheduled Tribe in Sonbhadra district and a Scheduled Caste in the rest of the state. The listings were checked against the 2011 census table of each state and Wikipedia's compilation of the order; amendments after 2011 were not checked.

Checked on 2026-11-07 against the sources below. The lists are amended from time to time and can differ by district; for a certificate, the current order or the state's list is what counts.

Name and Origin

Baiga is the word for a village priest or medicine man in this country, and Russell and Hira Lal (1916) note that the Gonds and Hindus around them treated the Baiga as the oldest residents and the priests of the local gods, whose word on a village boundary was taken as final. Bhumia, lord of the soil, is the name of that office and is used by one division of the tribe. Russell records the tribe's own story: in the beginning God made Nanga Baiga and his wife, the first people, who chose to live by felling trees in the forest; of their two sons one stayed a Baiga and the other became a Gond and a tiller of the soil. In another version the first Baiga cut down a stretch of sal forest in a day and was told to sow kutki millet in the ashes, the origin of bewar. Russell guessed that the Baiga were a branch of the Bhuiya of Chota Nagpur; that view was his and is not settled.

History

Russell and Hira Lal (1916) counted about 30,000 Baiga proper in 1911, in Mandla, Balaghat and Bilaspur, and thought the Binjhwar and Bhaina of Chhattisgarh were offshoots of the tribe. Under colonial forest rules bewar was stopped in most places. Verrier Elwin (1939), who lived among the Baiga of Mandla, records that a letter of 13 May 1890 confined all bewar-cutting Baigas of Mandla to a tract of 23,920 acres in the Ramgarh tehsil, the Baiga Chak or Baiga Reserve, where seven Baiga villages and 1,551 people already lived; Baigas outside it had to give up bewar or move in. Elwin wrote that the Chak was meant to wean the Baiga from bewar, not to preserve their way of life. In later lists the government counts the Baiga among the particularly vulnerable tribal groups.

Faith and Worship

Elwin (1939) found the Baiga pantheon varied from village to village and open to the gods of neighbours. Bara Deo, Thakur Deo and Dharti Mata, the earth mother, are among the deities most often named in his account, and the Baiga Dewar or priest serves the gods of other communities as well as his own. Elwin notes that the census stopped calling this religion 'animistic' in 1921 and called it 'tribal religion' instead. He found that they kept the days of Hindu festivals with meanings of their own.

Deities named in the sources: Bara Deo, Thakur Deo, Dharti Mata

Customs

Marriage is outside one's garh, and Russell records that a bride-price of five to twenty rupees was paid or the groom served the bride's father for about two years. The Encyclopedia of World Cultures, summarising Elwin, describes a full wedding over several days with a marriage booth (marua) and two old kinsmen (dosi) who conduct the rites, and a simpler haldi-pani or churi-pairana marriage that carries no stigma. Elwin records that the Baiga keep festivals at Holi, Dasahra and Diwali but with their own meanings: Dasahra is the time of the Baiga Bida rite. Elwin also records the Karma dance and the Dadaria and Karma songs.

Festivals

Stories and Legends